


Dreaming After Dawn

by Dolorosa



Category: The Bone Season - Samantha Shannon
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:14:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25483774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dolorosa/pseuds/Dolorosa
Summary: Paige and Warden visit Warden's dreamscape, and find it altered.This was written for the 2020 Sunshine Challenge, for the prompt of 'indigo'.
Relationships: Paige Mahoney/Warden | Arcturus Mesarthim
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5
Collections: Sunshine Challenge





	Dreaming After Dawn

It was, inevitably, Warden's idea. It wasn't so much that he decided for me — we were long past that — but more that he was the first to give voice to the anxious, gnawing _need_ that had been hovering at the edges of my mind for several days during my long, slow, recovery: I had to resume working with my voyant abilities. They had tried to take two things from me in the Westminster Archon: my trust in Warden, and my confidence and trust in my own abilities. The pair of us had begun the long work of repairing the former, and it was high time we took those first, fragile steps towards dealing with the latter. While it was comforting to view our little Paris hideaway as a charmed space, existing outside time, that wasn't true. The world went on, and neither of us knew how much time we had before the next blow would fall: a breath, a pause, but no more than that.

Warden broached the subject early one morning, after he had risked going outside our Paris safehouse, returning with pastries for my breakfast. At least he had waited until after I'd got some coffee in me. He sat across from me at the table, watching as I licked the last crumbs of food from my fingers, and poured another cup.

'Paige,' he said, 'what I am about to say is only a suggestion. You may refuse, you may defer it, you may make any other suggestion of your own. But I have been wondering — wondering if you feel ready.'

'You mean ready to begin dreamwalking again,' I said in reply. 'I've been thinking the same thing. I'm not up for full possession — I don't know when I will _ever_ feel ready for that. But if you are willing, I think some time walking through your dreamscape would be a good thing to try.'

He nodded his assent, and cleared the breakfast things away. We moved to the bedroom, and he sank down onto the narrow bed beside me. I noticed he was careful to keep a cautious distance between us, so that we never quite touched. I wondered what would happen if I closed that space, arms brushing against arms, hands against hands, and pushed the thought away in order to focus. I slipped down through the layers of consciousness, until I'd reached my destination.

It had been a while since I'd visited his dreamscape, and the changes were palpable. Gone was the cold, blank emptiness that had so shocked me, the first time he'd allowed me in — that unnerving, icy clarity. Instead, the space was cluttered, strewn with the accumulated bric a brac of centuries of memories. I recognised objects from our time in Magdalen, and things we'd encountered with the syndicate, and still more that were unfamiliar to me, no doubt reflecting the long years before the two of us had met. I nearly stumbled over a broken violin case, which spilled open to reveal an instrument that was missing most of its strings. Everything was covered with a light film of ice, and lit dimly, a place of shadows. I sensed Warden hovering behind me, and he moved to my side, and led me through the flickering, unearthly realm.

I don't know which of us noticed first, but I was certainly the first to react. I stretched out a hand instinctively towards Warden's arm, and gestured at his cluttered dreamscape with shock. As we moved through the space, it was shifting, and changing. A tangle of vines — ivy, honeysuckle, and grapes — had begun to grow, twisting its way across the ice-covered objects, keeping pace with our own footsteps. As we watched, yellow honeysuckle flowers burst forth, unnaturally large, blooming briefly, and then falling in a scattered heap. The grapes ripened to a wine-bright hue, increasing with abundance across the spreading vines.

Warden moved wordlessly towards these intrusive plants, his hands brushing the flowers, causing a fresh cascade of petals, and reached up to cup the grapes. I drew close to his side, and did the same. I had never seen such a thing happen in a dreamscape — and what was most unsettling of all was the fact that the appearance of these vines seemed to have happened spontaneously. Normally it would feel intrusive to touch the objects in Warden's dreamscape, but I craved that tactile reassurance. The fruit was icy to the touch, but solid enough. I wondered, wildly, what would happen if I pulled a grape from the vine and ate it.

'Paige,' said Warden, and his voice shocked me out of my reverie, reverberating around the silence of the dreamscape. 'Look.'

We were standing in a field of poppies. At first I thought I had lost control, and we had slipped into my own dreamscape by accident, but I was wrong. The poppies were not as I remembered them — the familiar, comforting sight, so much a part of my own mind that it was hard to tell where I ended and they began — and we were still standing in the cluttered, vine-tangled space into which Warden had invited me. But my poppies had come too, bleeding into Warden's dreamscape. They had only appeared when I had drawn closer to the other plants, spreading out in waves around me. As we looked, we could see the field visibly growing, new flowers blooming, expanding out beyond the dimly perceptible horizon.

They were not red, as the poppies of my own sunlit zone. Instead they were a soft, subtle indigo, matching the faint blush of dawn that had begun to illuminate what was normally a starless night sky. It was as if the walls between our two dreamscapes had crumbled, the light and life of my poppies spreading across the more funereal atmosphere of Warden's mind. And yet they, in this space, they were not purely _my_ poppies — they were reacting to Warden's dreamscape, changing colour, reflecting the mood and space around them. Their growth was almost audible.

Warden moved away from the tangle of vines, stepping carefully over the carpet of flowers, stopping when he had reached my side. In the stillness of the gathering dreamscape dawn, I pulled him closer, daring in dreams to do what I could not back in the physical world: bridge that gap, and take his hand. We stood in silence, adrift on a sea of indigo poppies

**Author's Note:**

> This fic takes place almost immediately after the events of _The Dawn Chorus_. You do not have to have read the novella to understand what's going on, but it is mildly spoilery for both _The Song Rising_ and _The Dawn Chorus_.


End file.
